Hart’s Ex-Press Aide Admits to Lying

Gary Hart’s former news media spokesman said, “Most press secretaries are liars,” including himself.

“I told two lies, both last May when Hart’s original 1988 campaign crumbled to its apparent end,” Kevin Sweeney wrote in review of “Speaking Out, Inside the Reagan White House,” by Larry Speakes, President Reagan’s spokesman for six years.

Sweeney, who served as Hart’s press secretary from 1985 until May, 1987, when Hart temporarily pulled out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he lied when he told a Washington Post reporter that Hart was asleep. He lied again when he later denied to another reporter that Hart’s campaign was about to end.

In the second case, “I was trying to buy time after being told yet another potentially fatal revelation, and, when an ABC reporter called at 4 a.m. asking me to verify a series of facts clearly indicating the campaign would come to an end within 48 hours--all of which were absolutely true--I emphatically said they were absolutely false,” Sweeney said.

“I was trying to protect the Harts’ privacy as they left for home,” he added in the review, published in the San Francisco Examiner.

Sweeney, who lives in nearby San Bruno, said because the campaign was ending, he no longer cared about his own credibility.